The Liberated Bride [Paperback]

Yochanan Rivlin, a professor at Haifa University, is a man of boundless and often naïve curiosity. His wife, Hagit, a district judge, is tolerant of almost everything but her husband's faults and prevarications. Frequent arguments aside, they are a well-adjusted couple with two grown sons.
When one of Rivlin's students-a young Arab bride from a village in the Galilee-is assigned to help with his research in recent Algerian history, a two-pronged mystery develops. As they probe the causes of the bloody Algerian civil war, Rivlin also becomes obsessed with his son's failed marriage.
Rivlin's search leads to a number of improbable escapades. In this comedy of manners, at once deeply serious and highly entertaining, Yehoshua brilliantly portrays characters from disparate sectors of Israeli life, united above all by a very human desire for, and fear of, the truth in politics and life.

PRAISE FOR THE LIBERATED BRIDE
Yehoshua, the most daring of the major Israeli writers, tells a simple story about a region that complicates all it touches . . . [and] remains, somehow, hopeful. -The New Yorker
The Liberated Bride is a magnificent, often comic, and humanely inexorable journey among Israel's Jews and their secret and denied sharers: the Arabs. . . .Yehoshua, who is 70 and a dove, has written a novel that incarnates the message to extraordinary literary effect. -The New York Times Book Review

PART I

A Village Wedding

HAD HE KNOWN that on this evening, on the hill where the village held its celebrations, an evening suffused by the scent of a fig tree bent over the table like another, venerable guest, he would again be struck-but powerfully-by a sense of failure and missed opportunity, he might have more decisively made his excuses to Samaher, his annoyingly ambitious M.A. student, who, not content with sending him an invitation by mail and then repeating it to his face, had gone and chartered a minibl­